Coast Guard looks for lessons in Matagorda miracle

A car dealer out for a yachting joyride turned up what rescue boats and Coast Guard planes, scouring the Gulf round the clock for six straight days, could not: three missing Matagorda boaters, clinging to their overturned catamaran, miraculously alive.

Joyous reunions with the missing men — James Phillips, Curt Hall and Tressell Hawkins — eclipsed their families’ despair of a day earlier, when the Coast Guard had called off a search that spanned 86,000 square miles, making it one of the most sprawling, labor-intensive searches ever conducted in the Gulf of Mexico.

The pilots and captains who had hunted feverishly for days were among the celebrants, erupting into fist pumps and shouts of relief when they got the call Saturday night: The men were safely aboard the Corpus Christi salesman’s yacht, Affordable Fantasy. As details of the capsized catamaran’s drifting weeklong course unfolded, Coast Guard officials began a Monday-morning quarterback session of epic proportions, trying to understand where the search effort went off course, and how they could have corrected it.

“I’m so glad they’re alive and we can hear the story,” said Capt. Marcus Woodring, commander of Coast Guard Sector Houston-Galveston, who helped lobby a Coast Guard admiral to prolong the search for two days longer than they might, statistically, have given up hope.

Sketchy details of the boat’s location — and of what happened to it and when — stymied searchers from the beginning.

No radio beacon

The Coast Guard began their search on Aug. 22, when the three men were reported late returning from an overnight fishing trip near Tequila Rig, about 75 miles off the Matagorda coast. Without a tracking device or a radio transmission — one of the boaters said he tried to make a call, but the boat immediately capsized before he could finish — searchers only had the word of rig workers who said they had seen the men there near nightfall on Aug. 21. The catamaran did not have an electronic positioning indicator radio beacon, or EPIRB, which could have given searchers a precise starting point. The Coast Guard centered its search on the rig and fanned out over time.

It was only after the men were found — 75 miles from the search effort’s epicenter — that they learned the catamaran actually capsized about 20 miles to the southwest, near a fishing spot called Hilltop, a good 24 hours before the search began.

“This is why search and rescue is so difficult,” Woodring said. “In the absence of solid information, you have to make planning assumptions. You have to start somewhere.”

Over the next week, boats circled and planes buzzed overhead, day and night, in scrolling search patterns. As time passed, the search area expanded, but the models were based on drift from Tequila Rig, not Hilltop.

Meanwhile, perched atop the overturned 23-foot catamaran, the men grew increasingly desperate, broiled by sun, parched by thirst and surrounded, at times, by schools of sharks. But they were resilient, and resourceful, scavenging a tarp from the boat to shield them from the sun and warm them at night, and diving to forage for food and water inside the vessel. They had flares, but used them within an hour after the boat filled with water, to no avail. Near-misses with other boats were now frustratingly futile, but they resisted the urge to swim for other ships. That, Woodring says, is what saved them.

Phillips told Woodring, in a phone call on Sunday, that he had seen a plane fly overhead, turn and circle back again.

“That indicates to me that he was close to the edge of a search pattern, where that turn would take place,” Woodring said.

The Coast Guard’s search and rescue system, built on probability statistical models, lists the average probability of being detected from a plane as 78 percent. But the pilot did not see the men waving T-shirts, far below: they were in the unlucky 22 percent.

In all, 45 different flights would log 250 hours of search time and six cutter missions would rotate three-day shifts before the crew made the difficult decision to suspend the search on Friday. A strict reading of the probability models might have called off the search as early as Wednesday. But searchers were hopeful, swayed by the pleas of relatives who said the men were skilled survivalists: outdoorsmen, fishers and hunters.

“We had families that were depending on us,” Woodring said. “People chomping at the bit to go out and try to locate these people. We continued for another couple days, and that’s part of our own humanitarian desire to keep helping.”

Fire extinguisher helps

Inundated by media requests, the families did not respond to phone calls Monday. But Phillips’ wife, Shane Phillips, said late last week she was devastated by the Coast Guard’s decision to discontinue the search.

The three men, plagued by heat exhaustion and hallucinations, still had one trick up their sleeves when they saw the 75-foot yacht pass by on Saturday evening. In addition to waving their T-shirts, they blew foam from a fire extinguisher to draw the captain’s attention.

The yacht’s owner, Eddie Yaklin, treated the men to a dinner of steak and Gatorade. When a Coast Guard crew caught up with them, the men declined medical attention, Woodring said.

Without speculating on the men’s probability of surviving as long as they did in the conditions they did, Woodring called it the most unique and difficult case he’s had in 25 years with the Coast Guard.

“This is one of the biggest search efforts I’ve seen.”

Now the case will be investigated by experts from the Coast Guard’s Yorktown, Va., search and rescue school, Woodring said. The lessons they’ve learned will likely be taught to a future generation of Coasties.